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Reading Accessibility

Reading Accessibility

New technology has the potential to dramatically improve the lives of those with reading disabilities—including the blind, dyslexic, and those with spinal injuries. Information in electronic formats can be made accessible using technologies like text-to-speech and refreshable Braille, opening up whole new worlds to people who have previously been unable to access information.

EFF believes that individuals in the disabled community, as those best placed to determine their own needs, should be free to transform copyrighted works into a form most suitable for their use, as well as to innovate new presentation forms, which they can share with other members of the community.

Unfortunately, companies are now using copyright law and DRM to prohibit the use of helpful assistive technologies and stamp out innovative new technologies that could make copyrighted works universally accessible.

This page catalogs the ongoing efforts of EFF and many others to ensure that those with reading disabilities can take full advantage of these emerging technologies.

Earlier this month we wrote about potential malicious behavior in Adobe's e-reader software, “Digital Editions.” There were several independent reports claiming that Adobe's software was sending back to Adobe—in the clear—a list of books read in the software. There were also independent reports that the program was sending back...

Fair use enjoyed a major victory in court today. In Authors Guild v. HathiTrust, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals handed down a decision that strongly underscores a fair use justification for a major book scanning program. For those counting along at home, today's decision marks another in a...

This morning the House Judiciary Committee held the latest in a series of hearings designed to set the stage for a deeper dive into copyright law and its discontents. Last week, the Committee heard from the "copyright sector"; this week it was a "tech sector." (We still believe...

There is a chronic lack of material in formats accessible to the world’s visually impaired and print disabled citizens. Visually impaired people face a “book famine” in which 95% of books published in rich countries and 99% in poorer countries are never converted into accessible formats such as audio, large...